Second edition

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the staging of any kind of public demonstration and resulted in a new series of nouns like a teach-in, study-in, talk-in, read-in, etc. which became independent of the existence of the corresponding phrasal verbs. A third development was the weakening of the earlier meanings to cover any kind of social gathering by a group, e.g. think-in, sing-in, fish-in, laugh-in, etc.
The second components of compound nouns often become such centres of creations by analogy as for instance the component -sick- in seasick and homesick gave on analogy car-sick, air-sick, space-sick. The compound noun earthquake led to birthquake (= population explosion), youthquake (= a world-wide agitation caused by student uprisings), starquake (= a series of rapid changes in the shape of the star). The noun teenager led to golden-ager, skyscraper to thighscraper (= a mini-skirt), house-wife to house-husband. The derivative component -proof gave sound-proof, bullet-proof, fool-proof, kiss-proof, love-proof, etc.
Productive word-formation has a specific distribution in relation to different spheres of communication, thematic and lexical stylistic groups of new words. New terminological vocabulary units appear mainly as a result of composition making extensive use of borrowed root-morphemes, and affixation with sets of affixes of peculiar stylistic reference,¹ often of Latin-Greek origin which are scarcely ever used outside this group of words, for example suffixes -ite, -ine- -tron, etc. The suffixes -in, -gen, -ogen are productive in the field of chemistry and biochemistry, e.g. citrin, penicillin, carcinogen; -ics in the naming of sciences as in radionics, bionics; the prefixes non-, pan-, suffixes -ism, -ist are most productive in political vocabulary, e.g. Nixonomics, Nixonomist, etc.
In comparison with specialised vocabulary items, lexical units of standard-colloquial layer are more often created by affixes of neutral stylistic reference, by conversion and composition.